16 November 2007

The Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen gallery has a memorial exhibit for Jeremy Blake running now until 5 January 2008. The gallery is number 529 West 20th Street on the 11th Floor. 529 is betwixt 10th and 11th Ave and the gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 A until 6:30 P. Go check it out.

From the Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen site:

"JEREMY BLAKE (1971 - 2007) is well known for his DVDs, C-prints, paintings and drawings that present visual semi-narratives combining the representational and the abstract. His highly acclaimed artworks blur distinctions between artistic media to present a new kind of art experience for which Blake is recognized as an innovative pioneer.

The luminous transmutations in Blake's earlier animations or "moving paintings", as he thought of them, slowly unfold in iconic and dreamlike seamless loops. His later more opulent and narrative works incorporate found photographs, film footage and his own art. His laboriously rendered images with countless layers of line and translucent color adopt techniques inherited from conventional drawing and painting, as well as editing effects suggestive of filmmaking. Projected or presented on large wall-mounted plasma screens, his DVDs offer a new artistic language and hybrid form of expression. Blake often touched upon socially relevant subject matter, as well as art historical references, as a kind of psychological framework to create visual containers for contemporary anxieties and discarded utopian ideals.

Blake's C-prints are not stills from his DVDs. They are either source images or independent and original compositions. These "digital paintings" are often abstract settings or composites of fictional "stories" that he might mythologize in his drawings and paintings or further explore and expand upon in his time-based DVDs.

Blake's works have been exhibited extensively in museums and galleries worldwide, and are represented in numerous public collections including the Centrode Arte CajadeBurgos, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. In 2002 he was invited by director Paul Thomas Anderson to create abstract sequences of art for the film, Punch-Drunk Love. He also produced a series of album covers and inserts for Beck's CD, Sea Change. "

I was never much of a fan of Blake's digital stuff. I found it all a bit too Pink Floyd/lava lamp for me but his paintings were very cool.